Cogiscan Founders Exit The Business
Back in December Cogiscan announced that their founders André Corriveau, Vincent Dubois and François Monette will leave the business this month.
This follows iTAC Software acquiring Cogiscan at the beginning of 2021, which itself was acquired by the Dürr Group back in 2015.
As I said at the time there is normally a period of time where senior management have to stay with the business to conduct the handover and the business generally operates with little changes and the companies use the time to form new relationships with the team at the partnering company.
The hiring and firing and general organisational restructure normally occurs by the new management leaving the former management with clean hands. Clearly where there are Founders involved and they have actively engaged with the company till the end, the Exit of them can be disruptive and emotional for the team they leave.
To avoid this, often staff are promoted to the C-suite before this time so the Founders can fade away. However the time a Buyer can be found is not always easy to plan and you risk creating a walking-dead company in the meantime.
Today, Mitch DeCaire, Senior Director of Business Development, who I first met at Productronica in 2015, has also announced that he is also leaving after more than 20 years of service to join Cogiscan customer Juki Americas.
When I left DeK Printing Machines in 2014, which at the time was being sold by the Dover Corporation to ASM Pacific Technology, I knew the next few years would contain lots of distractions. The company had already been distracted by the economic fluctuations of the 2008 recession, so I couldn't wait much longer (I was young) to develop and release what would become MultiPlug, though within DeK it was a Innovation project called Exposé.
This was software to create web browser based user interfaces for manufacturing equipment but operated on the intranet or what is now known to be the Edge. Traditionally these interfaces were created using Desktop Applications that were limiting and the technical talent had already moved to web browser based technology i.e Internet Technologies.
Looking back, without needing to play the constant business politics game, we were able to develop a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) far quicker than if I had stayed. As a comparison their new Stencil Printer the DEK TQ was being developed when I left in 2014 and was only released in 2020. Today, all the senior management have retired or moved on so it's a completely different company from what I left.
Synergies
Cogiscan's story interests me because while our business was formed as a User Experience business (User Interfaces) we have fallen into machine connectivity by creating Adaptors for the Hermes Standard and the Connected Factory Exchange (CFX), which is the bread and butter of what Cogiscan do.
Our customers tell us our Adaptors now operate in Cogiscan and Aegis Software brownfield sites. This is new terminology to me and it wasn’t our plan to create a landgrab. It’s actually been rather difficult to make relationships with the MES (Manufacturing Execution System) software platform providers. They often operate very closed sales channels and I feel their customer base detects this and want more open solutions from independent companies so agile and experimental solutions can be tried.
They could all really improve in creating software development integration documentation that are openly available on their websites. I even had one that wanted us to sign a NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) to learn about their software which is crazy.
The story of Cogiscan is detailed in this great article in SMT Today by Julie Cliche-Dubois. It's interesting to learn that their 'SMEMA-traffic cop interlocking' solution was one of their earliest catapult products with customer Juki. They call it a Product Flow Controller (PFC) and while I have heard about it for a long time I had always found it difficult to find a picture of one. I have now.
Our market research was very poor at the start. We fell into creating the SMEMA Hermes Adaptor by creating MultiPlug, then customers would want something simpler to only interact with SMEMA and so thanks to a Dorset Growth Hub grant we created the SMEMA Ethernet Adaptor.
This has allowed us to work with inspection system OEMs and system integrators to interface with SMEMA.
We thought the market had been taken but our customers thought differently and because of the closed sales channels detailed above I can't blame them. These are software companies so should be open but they have been pulled to the dark side by the hardware industry and their standard ways of doing business. Namely putting the sales team and not their Engineers at the front of their companies.
The Cogiscan founder exit is being billed as retirement by the company and so I wish them a relaxing future. They have been replaced by Martin Drolet, Benoit Ouellet and Marie-Andrée Courtemanche. Entrepreneurs stereotypically get bored in retirement so I hope to learn about what new things they get up to or what new businesses they form. I'm always on the lookout for mentorship.
About 4IR.UK British Systems
We are a Smart Factory solutions provider for the SMT Electronics Assembly manufacturing industry. We were founded in 2016 after the support of a seed funded Business Accelerator. We create hardware Adaptors that operate in more than 20 countries that extend the life of SMEMA based manufacturing equipment by providing solutions for production monitoring and supporting data connections to the Hermes Standard and the Connected Factory Exchange CFX. We also develop Software Extensions for the Low-Code No-Code MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform. The flexibility of off-the-shelf software combined with inside industrial experience means that 4IR.UK is ideally placed to anticipate and respond to a factory's changing needs.
